Last week the new French government under prime minister Michel Barnier unveiled its 2025 budget proposals and there was no ambiguity when it came to education. Controlling spending on public services “mainly comes from changes in staffing within the the national education system”, it stated.
In practical terms, this means 4,035 teaching posts are expected to be cut. Most of the burden will fall on the state primary education sector which will lose 3,115 posts, on top of the 1,300 lost last year. The state secondary sector will lose “only” 181 posts. That section of the private education that is contracted to the state education service will lose a total of 700 posts. These represent by far the largest such cuts since 2017, the start of Emmanuel Macron's first term as president, and especially since 2022, the start of his second term.
So how can the government still maintain that the “Republic's schools remain a priority for the government despite budgetary constraints”? It will be done through clever public relations. For in 2025 the state will indeed spend 834 million euros more than in 2024 on the national education system, bringing the ministry's overall budget to 63 billion euros. But this conveniently overlooks the budgetary upheaval of the past year.
Funds that had been allocated to the education system were slashed by approximately 700 million euros in February this year, as part of a last-minute savings plan hastily introduced by the then-finance minister Bruno Le Maire. So the “additional” 834 million euros is, in reality, just filling the funding gap that was discovered by new education minister Anne Genetet when she “arrived” in her new post. Her team has admitted as much to the press.
What's more, nearly half of this “extra” money – which is partly fictitious - will be used to cover a “natural” increase in the ministry's expenditure. Let’s not forget that the ministry employs 1.2 million people, making it the largest state employer. The much-talked-about “GVT” - for “glissement vieillesse technicité”, which refers to the natural progression of public sector salaries linked to the ageing and career advancement of its staff - will already cost 350 million euros more next year.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
This was the main reason why the former education minister Nicole Belloubet, replaced during the appointment of the Barnier government, had strongly insisted on the education budget being - at the very least - “ring-fenced”. In fact, the current minister has only the smallest margin of manoeuvre within such a tight budget framework.
To make the pill easier to swallow, both the prime minister's office and the Ministry of Education avoid speaking of 4,000 job cuts in total, and instead refer to a figure of 2,000. This is because education minister Anne Genetet and prime minister Michel Barnier include in the equation the creation of 2,000 additional posts for support staff for children with special needs. This confirms the prediction made in a recent report on inclusion by the state audit body, the Court of Auditors: that these special needs support staff have, over the years, become a major part of the Ministry of Education's staffing policy.
There are a few obvious points to make about this: these support staff are highly valued by families, there are far too few of them everywhere, and these positions are part-time and poorly paid despite a recent very small increase in pay. Their role is to help a child or a group of children to ensure their continued attendance at a “mainstream” school. But they do not provide additional teaching resources.
A political retreat
These new cuts to the teaching workforce also go against promises made by the president. Since his re-election in 2022, Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly stressed the central role that education plays in his vision for France, to the extent that he has earned the nickname “education super-minister” - albeit of the most authoritarian variety.
But this has never translated into a release of new funding. Instead, the president and his successive ministers have relied on flashy announcements and reforms that have gradually bogged the system down even more. It is through this lens that we should view the the decision in the new budget plan to temporarily halt the implementation of streaming or tracking in the fourth and third years at school (Year 9 UK/8th grade US and year 10/9th grade). This reform has not only been criticised over its educational value, but also for being costly in terms of staffing. However, this is the first time that such a clear policy retreat has been seen.
Ex-prime minister Gabriel Attal, who was briefly education minister, also made this issue a central part of his political ascent. In 2024, he managed to secure some additional teaching posts and, when he became prime minister in January, even declared that he was “bringing the cause of education to [the prime minister's office]”. Now the head of Macron's group of MPs in the National Assembly, Attal might well assert his views on this issue - as on others - during the impending budget debate in Parliament.
The demographic myth persists
Finally, the narrative being spun by the Barnier government has highlighted another issue; and this is a supposed power struggle between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Economy and Finance. The two government inspectorates representing these two ministries jointly wrote a report, made public on September 12th, which has explosive implications
Based entirely on demographic decline - and thus a decrease in student numbers over the next decade - this document opened the door to the closure of hundreds of primary school classes and thousands in secondary schools, resulting in a drastic reduction in “required teaching resources”. This brusque “bean-counting” approach was seen by those familiar with the workings of the Ministry of Education as having the fingerprints of the Ministry of Economy and Finance all over it.
The Education Ministry points out that this was not the scenario chosen for the 2025 budget, and that catastrophe has thus been avoided. Yet the myth around school demographics persists. “Following a reduction of more than 300,000 pupils since 2017, a further 81,000 fewer pupils are expected at the start of the 2024 school year, and 97,000 fewer in 2025 (both public and private). In total, 390,000 fewer pupils are expected between 2023 and 2027, bringing the cumulative decline in school numbers over a decade to nearly 700,000,” notes the ministry in its report on the budget proposals.
This allows the government to conclude that, despite a cut of 4,000 teaching posts, the 2025 budget “still allows for an increase in the teacher-student ratio due to the decreasing demographic trend in the student population”.
Despite a brief respite during the presidency of François Hollande (2012-2017), over the past twenty years the education system has lost thousands of teaching positions, even as more and more children entered school. For secondary schools alone, SNES, the main teaching union for colleges and high schools, has calculated that around 10,000 jobs would need to be created to return to the teacher-student ratio of 2017, and just over 45,000 to reach the levels of 2006.
At that time, a growing school population was not considered a reason to recruit, which naturally deepened the deficit in teaching resources. “As early as 2002, the government of [prime minister Jean-Pierre] Raffarin [editor's note, under President Jacques Chirac] turned a blind eye to a problem that was becoming increasingly obvious, and which continued to grow... namely how to accommodate tens of thousands of additional students across the various stages of the school system,” explained sociologist Stéphane Bonnéry in an interview with Mediapart. The demographic downturn from 2021 onwards has not been enough to relieve this pressure.
Indeed, France remains one of the countries with the highest student-to-teacher ratios, with 23 students per teacher across the board in 2020. The average within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is 13. Although the situation has improved somewhat in primary education, this is solely due to the halving of class sizes for early years, a measure introduced in 2018 for schools in priority education zones.
The new education minister, Anne Genetet, will likely point to an alignment between resources and student numbers by the end of August 2025. And this may well be true on the first day of term. But the point needs to be hammered home that this says nothing about the challenges that will arise in the following days, which the government refuses to address with any real seriousness. By cutting more than 4,000 posts, they are severely limiting the chances of having a fully-trained teacher present in a classroom on every day of the school year.
Once again, the ministry believes it has a hidden solution: it has increased by 98 million euros its funding of a new scheme - called “Pacte” - designed to finance more short-term teaching replacements. However, aside from the fact that this teaching pact is not widely welcomed by teachers, it only applies to secondary education and does not ensure subject-specific replacements. A mathematics teacher may thus stand in for an art teacher and vice versa. While students may well be “looked after” by the schools, these stand-in teachers are unlikely to be able to give the pupils their proper lessons.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter